also by Helen Gardner The Composition of " A READI"iG OF PARADISE LOST RELIGION AND LITERA.TCRE Four Quartets THE BUSINESS OF CRITICISM

(Edited by) A BOOK OF RELIGIOUS VERSE HELEN GARDNER THE METAPHYSICAL POETS THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF ENGLISH VERSE

NEW YORK

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1978 First published in Great Britain I978 by Faber and Faber Limited First published in America Preface by O:cford Uni'oersity Press Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Oxford by Vivian Ridler Printer to the University M v first sight of the drafts of Four Quartets and of the correspondence All rights reserved with John Hayward about them was in 1947, when, as the result of a query from me over a Donne manuscript, he asked me to come to tea and showed © Helen Gardner I978 me the volumes he had bound up. This was the beginning of a close and Quotationsfrom the works oJT. S. Eliot© Valerie Eliot I978 affectionate friendship to which my labours on this book have been a kind ExtractsJrom letters and other writings by John Hayward © The Provost oj of tribute. For I knew, as I worked, that what I was doing would have given King's College, Cambridge and Mrs. Diana Oakeley I978 him pleasure. That it would have given pleasure to Eliot is more doubtful. In February Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 77-92749 194I, he wrote to the Librarian of Magdalene College, Cambridge, of which ISBN 0-19-519989-8 he was an Honorary Fellow, to enquire whether the college library took 'any interest in "contemporary manuscripts"', adding 'I don't see why it should', and offered it the 'mss.' of The Dry Salvages with the option of refusal: 'if you do like to have such mss. I shall be glad to hand over this and future ones; but if you don't there is no need to take them just to be kind.' When ~---~··--·-theMaster (A;R Ramsay), to whom the Librarian had handed the letter, wrote to express the College's pleasure in accepting the gift, Eliot expanded his uneasiness:

From the point of view of an author, I am not sure such papers should be preserved at all; from the point of view of a librarian, they seem to me a nuisance: but if they are to be preserved, I should be sorry to think that they should be divided only between the Bodleian and Eliot House and that none should be at Magdalene.

Some eighteen months later he wrote again to the Master to say it 'would be a pleasure' to add 'the manuscripts and papers' of Little Gidding to those connected with The Dry Salvages, with a qualification:

When I say that this would be a pleasure, I do not wish this quite truthful assertion to be construed as expressing general approval of the preservation of my own or indeed of most manuscripts. As a general rule, to which I cannot perceive my own work to provide any exception, it seems to me that posterity should be left with the product, and not be encumbered with a record of the process, of such compositions as these. Their presentation, however, affords an author one of the few means at his disposal for showing his gratitude and appreciation, such as lowe towards Magdalene: and it is in this spirit that I have proposed sub­ tracting these papers from the national supply of pulp. 693269 VI PREFACE PREFACE Vll

Although I share some of Eliot's apprehension that the current interest in tion about the progress of the poem, the circumstances in which it was poets at work may distract attention from what finally emerged from all written, and the major sources. Both here and in the commentary I have their toil, and believe, with him, that the study of the creative process, how­ quoted, sometimes exten.sively, fro~ articles that are not easily availab.le, ever interesting, has far less to give us than a study of the object created, including uncollected artIcles by Ehot. Far more people than scholars wIth I am reassured by the fact that four years spent with abandoned fragments, access to university libraries cherish these poems and I have tried to bear discarded readings, and what Eliot called the 'Litter' of composition has not their interests in mind. diminished my love for these poems or my conviction of their greatness. My greatest debt is to Mrs. Valerie Eliot for giving me access to all the It has, indeed, contributed to an increase of that 'understanding and enjoy­ unpublished material with a bearing on Four Quartets and for giving me ment' which Eliot in later life thought it was the prime function of criticism freedom to use it as I thought best. She has also given me information to promote. I might otherwise not have found and been most generous in answering my The length of the poems and the amount of material, particularly for questions. After her, lowe most to the late Dr. A. N. L. Munby. As the Little Gidding, has posed problems of presentation. Although Eliot was not Librarian in charge of the Hayward Collection in King's College Library, unique among poets in inviting and accepting criticism of 'work in progress' and as an old friend of Hayward's, he was enthusiastic over the whole from his friends, it is rare-in my experience unique-to find such dis­ enterprise and nobody could have been more helpful. His death, before cussion committed to paper. It seemed to me imperative for readers' comfort I had brought the work to a conclusion, was both a personal and professional that they should have the final text before them, with the process of revision loss. I am very grateful to his assistant, Mrs. Penelope Bulloch, for helpful­ attached and the comments and queries with Eliot's replies immediately ness throughout and especially after Dr. Munby's death. I have also to presented. This has involved cutting up the text and the letters, which thank the Librarians at Magdalene College, Professor J. A. W. Bennett and I regret; but the alternative would face the reader with continually flipping Mr. Pepys Whitely, for kindness in allowing me to work in the Library and to and fro to remind himself of the wording of the passage being discussed. for supplying me with photocopies, and Professor Bennett and his son, I have, however, printed in full the first draft of Little GiddingwithHiyward's~ ~""~'~'Plers,forreci:msiruCtiiig the torn-up manuscript pad there. Like all who letter upon it in an Appendix, to allow a reader the shock of reading a familiar work on Eliot I am indebted to Dr. Donald Gallup. He sent me photocopies poem in an unfamiliar form and, if he wishes, to play the game of what of the manuscript of East Coker IV and showed me Eliot's letters to Mrs. comment he would have made if faced by it as Hayward was. Perkins, his hostess at Chipping Campden, as well.as being always ready to I was tempted at the beginning to be selective and to print only those answer queries. I have also to thank the Librarian of the Houghton Library, passages and readings from the drafts which seemed to me to be significant, Harvard, for supplying me with copies of the drafts for 'Lines for an Old fearing that they might be buried under a mass of trivialities. But I decided Man' and for permission to publish them, and Mr. David Farmer, Assistant that it was my duty to make the material available and not to impose my own Director of the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at criterion of significance upon it. The correspondence shows Eliot so Austin, for telling me of the typescript of The Dry Salvages there, for scrupulous over the minutest details in his 'wrestle with words and meanings' supplying me with a photocopy, and for permission to quote its readings that I came to the conclusion that all changes in the drafts should be noted. and to quote from a letter from Eliot to Philip Mairet. lowe my knowledge I have made an exception in dealing with the working typescripts, as distinct of this to Mr. Paul Anderson. I am grateful to the late Rear-Admiral from the drafts, of Little Gidding und not noted punctuation variants in Samuel Eliot Morison and the Editors of The American Neptune for per­ them. Eliot's manuscript drafts are very lightly punctuated, or not at all, mission to quote in extenso from his article on 'The Dry Salvages and the and his working typescripts are erratically punctuated. It is in those drafts Thacher Shipwreck' and to Professor Harry Levin for calling my attention which are in the nature of 'fair copies' that he gave his mind to problems of to this article. punctuation. For the benefit of those who are not interested in changes in Mr. George Every, formerly of the Society of the Sacred Mission at a preposition or alterations of punctuation I have signalized by an asterisk Kelham, gave me information about Eliot's visits to Kelham and his sight readings which are the subject of discussion in the commentary. of a kingfisher in flight there in the summer of the year in which he wrote As this book is not 'an edition of Four Quartets' many passages that an Burnt Norton and also, most kindly, lent me the first draft of a verse play editor would annotate are left without annotation. What annotation I have of his on King Charles's visit to Little Gidding after Naseby which Eliot provided arises usually out ofhitherto unpublished material. I have attempted read and discussed with him in I936, the year he went there. Mrs. Oakeley, in Part I to provide a background to the study of the drafts by giving informa- John Hayward's sister, gave me personal information about him. Among viii PREFACE many with whom I have discussed the work I should like particularly to thank Mr. Vivian Ridler for his kindness in giving me expert advice on methods of presentation, 1V1rs. Annt Ridltr, at one tirfle Eliot's secretary An ietters, drafts, and other material by T. S. Eliot are copyright and a friend of Hayward's, who read some of the material in early stages, to Mrs. Valerie Eliot and cannot be reproduced without her and Mr. Jon Stallworthy, who gave me the benefit of his advice drawing on permission. By the terms ofJohn Hayward's will his correspondence his experience in working on the rather different problems of the papers of with Eliot is reserved and may only be consulted with permission Yeats and Wilfred Owen. I am greatly indebted to Mr. R. E. Alton for help from Mrs. Eliot. in deciphering some difficulties in manuscript. I was more than fortunate in having the assistance of Mrs. Bridget Bertram as a research assistant, whose skill in typing and setting out the material saved me hours of labour. Miss M. E. Griffiths of St. Anne's College enabled me to have my typescript xeroxed in the deadest depth ofthe long vacation. Finally, I must acknowledge the skill and care of the staff at the Oxford University Press in dealing with very difficult copy, and their patience and helpfulness over the proof­ reading. I would like to add that lowe much to the classes I have given in the last few years on Four Quartets in Oxford. Members both gave me information and made suggestions, and also, by asking questions I could not answer at the time, stimulated enquiry. Most of all, by their obvious love for the poems they confirmed my belief that these poems that spoke so powerfully to our condition in the dark years when they first appeared still speakwith power to a later generation. HELEN GARDNER THE GROWTH OF FOUR QUARTETS published in the New English Weekly on 15 October and appeared in pamphlet form on I December. Four Quartets appeared first in America. It was published II May 1943· CHAPTER 3 There were two impressions of this book. The first was so badly printed that all but 788 of its 4,165 copies were destroyed. The entire impression would have been destroyed but for the need to meet the publication date in order The Sources of Four Quartets to keep copyright.2s The English edition did not appear until 3 I October I944. Its dust-jacket bore a rather misleading statement: The four poems which make up this volume have all appeared 'Autumn weather': I do not get the significance of autu~n? It separately .... The author, however, has always intended them to be struck me as having a greater significance than you may have published as one volume, and to be judged as a single work.29 intended it to have. HAYWARD to ELIOT, on a line in the first draft of Little Gidding, I August 1941. As this story of the writing of the poem has shown, no such scheme was in 'Autumn weather' only because it was autumn weather-it is Eliot's mind when he wrote Burnt Norton, nor, the war having made the supposed to be an early air raid -and to throw back to Figlia che writing of another play seem futile, when he 'picked up his tablets again' piange (but not having my Poems by me I may be misquoting) but with less point than the children in the appletree meaning to tie up and wrote East Coker. In Four Quartets, the Greek epigraphs were printed New Hampshire and Burnt Norton (with a touch, as I discovered on the reverse of the table of Contents, as if applying to the whole sequence. in the train, of 'They' which I don't think I had read for 30 years, In the Collected Poems I909-I962, they reverted to being epigraphs to Burnt but the quotation from E. B. Browning has always stuck in my head, Norton alone. Mrs. Valerie Eliot tells me that Eliot had thought of prefixing and that may be due to 'They' rather than to the Bardess herself), as epigraph to the volume as a whole an observation by a modern philosopher, ELIOT to HAYWARD, 5 August 1941. Mr. Roker of the Fleet prison: 'What a rum thing time is, ain't it, Neddy?'30 ",_",betwe(!fl, the, Ilsua1,subjects of poetry and 'devotional' verse there is a very important field still very unexplored by modern poets-the experience of man in search of God, and trying to explain ,8 Gallup, 72. to himself his intenser human feelings in terms of the divine goal, , , '0 The statement on the dust-cover is quoted by Gallup, 73. A confused memory of it led to an error in my The Art of T. S. Eliot (I949), 46, corrected in the preface to the sixth impression (I968). ELIOT to WILLIAM FORCE STEAD, 9 August 1930, 30 The Pickwick Papers, chapter 42. The major sources of Four Quartets are experiences:-'it was autumn,' The experiences are both actual experiences and experiences revived in memory. These last come back with a new power as their meaning is apprehended: We had the experience but missed the meaning, And approach to the meaning restores the experience In a different form, beyond any meaning We can assign to happiness. The experiences, whether actual or remembered, arise from, or are con­ nected with, certain places recreated as they were at certain seasons. The places and seasons give rise to memories of what has been and what might have been: the actualities and the potentialities of the past. Although the egoism of a contirmal use of the first person singular is avoided, sometimes by a rather uneasy use of 'we' or 'one', there is no attempt to disguise the personal and confessional nature of the poems. They are meditations on the experiences of a lifetime, and any study of their sources must begin with biography, But a poet's biography is much more than the narrative of 30 THE SOURCES OF FOUR QUARTETS THE SOURCES OF FOUR QUARTETS 31 events in his life. In exploring his past to discover its meaning, Eliot also O'host of Hamlet's father, who 'faded on the crowing of the cock'. This was explored his past as a poet. He deliberately echoed himself, 'throwing back' ~n allusion that Eliot made deliberately and was unwilling to lose in order to 'La Figlia che Piange'., 'meaning to tie up' 'Ne,v Hampshire' and Burnt to meet an objection by Hayward.s It might be said to have propriety, Norton, and insisting on retaining a phrase that Hayward queried in Little enforcing the purgatorial meaning of an encounter that at the beginning Gidding 'because I was using a line from the Family Reunion'.1 Since '~~i'oe ..." ... oe .....••. -appears infernal. But the first scene of Hamlet was a scene that Eliot picked a poet's life is not merely the record of events, or the history of his develop­ out for special praise and analysis in his lecture on 'Poetry and Drama' ,6 ment as a poet, but also the record of what fed his imagination and stimulated and I suspect that it was more the beauty of Shakespeare's phrase than its his intelligence in his reading, the poems are soaked in literary reminiscences. appropriateness that made him want to echo it in Little Gidding. Sometimes Some of these, like the memory of Kipling's story 'They', not read for thirty the original sense of a passage that Eliot echoes is amusingly at odds with years, or of Mrs. Browning's poem, read some twenty-five years before and the sense in which he uses it. Thus, in this same Dantean passage he sub­ I suspect not re-read, lie buried very deep and were recalled unconsciously.2 stituted for a line that Hayward queried the line as it stands in the final The poems are poems of experience and are not built upon literary sources. version: 'Where you must move in measure, like a dancer', writing that he There is a certain amount of direct quotation: the passage from Sir Thomas rather liked 'the suggestion of the new line which carries some reminder of Elyot, given in archaic spelling, and the passage from St. John of the Cross a line, I think it is about Mark Antony'. Actually the phrase is used by, and in East Coker; the quotation from the Bhagavad-Gita in The Dry Salvages, not about, Antony, who says contemptuously of Octavius that he 'at Philippi ascribed within the poem-'So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna'; kept/His sword e'en like a dancer'. Sometimes, though rather rarely, the the quotations from Julian of Norwich and from The Cloud of Unknowing, recognition of a source that Eliot had in mind can guide us to an inter­ the first identified as a quotation by the capitalized archaic form 'Behovely' pretation. A striking example is the obvious reminiscence of Gide's Le and the second by being set as a separate line. These are quotations and Promithie mal enchazne in the manuscript notes for Part IV of East Coker.7 they are not made ironically, as are so many of the quotations in Eliot's But literary echoes and allusions are less fundamental as sources than places, earlier poetry. It is, therefore, of little importance to our understanding to - .,,··~·-···--times, and seasons, and, above all, the circumstances in which the Q.Iartets look up the original passage. Its sense has not been twisted and there is no were written. clash between the original and the context in which Eliot has set it. But, as i. BURNT NORTON with minor reminiscences and echoes, although recognition may not assist understanding, it enriches our reading of the poems. They come to us as In October 1932 Eliot left England for six months in order to deliver the the fruit of a lifetime's reading and thinking, carrying memories of events Charles Eliot Norton lectures at his old university, Harvard, and the Page­ and of persons, and of phrases that echoed and sang in Eliot's mind.3 Thus, Barbour lectures at the University of Virginia. He had not visited the United when Eliot substituted 'the spectre of a Rose' for 'the ghost of a Rose' in States since 1915, when he had gone over for a brief visit to tell his parents the third section of Little Gidding, he built into his poem a memory of one of his marriage and of his decision to settle in England. He said good-bye of the great aesthetic experiences of his early years in London, preferring the to his wife at Southampton, and while he was in America instructed his recollection of Nijinsky's famous leap in the ballet of that name to an echo solicitor to begin proceedings for a legal separation. He returned thus to his of Sir Thomas Browne, which he did not in fact recognize until Hayward native country and to his old university, where, but for the accident of the drew his attention to it.4 To know this adds nothing to our appreciation of outbreak of war in 1914, he might have made a career as a Professor of the force of the repudiation of reactionary sentiment in politics in the poem, Philosophy, knowing that a whole, long, distressful chapter of his life had and the reference may be regarded as a delightful irrelevance. The echo corne to an end. It was a time of painful reflection on what had been and on of Hamlet, when the 'familiar compound ghost' in Little Gidding 'faded on what might have been, of memories intertwined with the scenes of his child­ the blowing of the horn', does not equate this mysterious figure with the hood and young manhood. It was a time for taking up old contacts and old friendships. It was also a time when the future was uncertain and had I See p. 223. , In this chapter only the major sources will be dealt with. Occasional allusions and reminiscences somehow to be built on the failure of the past. are given in the commentary to the poems. 3 Whoever indulges in spotting allusions and echoes in Eliot's poems must remember Eliot's own 5 See p. I96. comments on Livingston Lowes's The Road to Xanadu and on 'the criticism of explanation by origins'. 6 Poetry and Drama (Harvard University Press, 1951), reprinted in On Poetry and Poets (1957), See 'The Frontiers of Criticism' (University of Minnesota Press, I956), reprinted in On Poetry and Poets 72-88. Eliot explained in the preface to On Poetry and Poets that the passage analysing the first scene in (I957).107-8. 4 See p. 202. Hamlet was taken from a lecture given at Edinburgh University before the war. 7 See pp. 43-6. 32 THE SOURCES OF FOUR QUARTETS THE SOURCES OF FOUR QUARTETS 33 When Eliot returned to England at the end of June 1933, he was met by countrY. He joined the household of Mrs. Mirrlees, mother of his friend Frank Morley, the Morleys having offered him a home in their seventeenth­ Hope ~Iin'lees, at Shamley Green, near Guildford. He would come up to century farmhouse, Pikes Farm, in the 'angle \vhere Surrey, Kent, Sussex London for two days a week, usually from Tuesday to Thursday, sleeping come together'. Having settled him in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', the Morleys either at the Fabers' house in Hampstead, or in their flat above the office in w<:nt off for a holiday, leaving him alone. 'There are times', writes Morley, ,···.,." •• ·" ..,Russ ell Square, or at his club; and he took his share of fire-watching at the when a man may feel as ifhe had come to pieces, and at the same time is firm. It was. at Shamley Green that he wrote The Dry Salvages and Little standing in the road inspecting the parts, and wondering what sort of GI'dding. But one can understand why, in spite of this, he thought of calling a machine it will make ifhe can put it together again. It was fourteen years the four poems 'Kensington Quartets'. Their roots lay in the Kensington later, and speaking of his own feelings, that Tom used that figure of period in ,,:,hich having 'c.ome ~o pie.ces' he ha.d to 'reconstruct the. machine' ; speech, and I fancy there was a stress upon the pronoun; he had to draw and, in solItude, had to lIve WIth hIS memones 'and make them mto some­ upon his sources, for reconstruction, perhaps involving redirection, of thing new'. IO the machine he knew about better than any outside mechanic.s . After the publication of Ash Wednesday, dedicated 'To my Wife', in I93 0 , Eliot endured one of his recurrent periods of sterility. It has been By the time that the Morleys returned, on 7 August, Eliot was in touch with reported that, in some prefatory remarks before a recital of some passages other friends and had begun discussing collaboration in the pageant-play from The Rock, he said that 'he had doubted during the two or three years The Rock. On 22 September Martin Browne offered him the commission. before The Rock was composed, whether he had any more poetry to write'." He left Pikes Farm at the end of 1933 and moved to a guest-house in Court­ Having published 'Triumphal March' as an Ariel Poem in I931 and field Gardens, South Kensington, wanting to be in touch with the theatre 'Difficulties of a Statesman' in Commerce (Winter 1931-2), he abandoned in London. As soon as he settled there he began to attend St. Stephen's, the plan of writing a political sequence 'Coriolan'. He fell back on 'Five­ Gloucester Road, and very soon became Vicar's Warden. After only a few finger Exercises', which were published in the Criterion in January 1933. months at Courtfield Gardens he moved into the clergy-house at St. ~--Cfhese;·as has been pointed out, are 'exercises in pure allusiveness and Stephen's, and in 1937 he and the Vicar, the Rev. Eric Cheetham, moved imitation; they give a clue to certain "music" in the Quartets'. 12 They are to a flat at I I Emperor's Gate. He was here when the war broke out and woven out of a tissue of allusions loosely associated in the poet's mind and enrolled as a Warden at the local Air-Raid Wardens' Post. Both at the clergy­ point forward to one mode of allusion in Four Quartets. After his return house and at Emperor's Gate, Eliot led an independent life, living and eat­ from America Eliot published two short poems under the title 'Words for ing alone and making much use of his club, the Oxford and Cambridge Music': 'New Hampshire' and 'Virginia'. They were printed in the Virginia University Club. He was also frequently away, lecturing, or at conferences, Quarterly Review in April 1934 and, privately, for distribution by the author or visiting friends in the country. During the Kensington period his main in February 1935. In October 1935 'Rannoch, by Glencoe' appeared in interest was in the theatre, first with the two commissioned plays, The Rock, the New English Weekly, and two further short landscape poems, 'Usk' produced in May 1934, and Murder in the Cathedral, produced in I935. and 'Cape Ann', were privately printed in the same month for distribution Between these and his most ambitious effort in the theatre, The Family by the author at Christmas~ All five poems appeared in Collected Poems Reunion, produced in March 1939, he brought out the Collected Poems I909-I935 under the heading 'Landscapes'.13 I909-I935. The volume included the slender stock of poems written since the As the title 'Words for Music', used for the first two, shows, the five publication of Ash Wednesday in 1930: the two 'Coriolan' poems, the 'Five­ 'Landscapes' carry further the musical patterning and musical allusiveness finger Exercises', the 'Landscapes', and the 'Lines for an Old Man', adding a fuel crisis. I well remember a pupil of mine at Birmingham University ploughing through February . to these, as the final poem in the volume, Burnt Norton. Eliot remained at fog and snow with a bucket of coal affectionately inscribed 'Flowers for Teacher'. Emperor's Gate for the first year of the war and was there when he wrote W cf. Reilly in The Cocktail Party (p. 165): East Coker. Hayward, writing to Morley in February 1940, refers to Eliot's You will have to live with these memories and make them 'somewhat unsettled domestic life' at Emperor's Gate 'where the pipes froze Into something new. Only by acceptance and then burst, so that for a week he had to shave and shit at the Club, and Of the past will you alter its meaning. consequently caught a cold.'9 In November 1940 Eliot transferred to the II Herbert Howarth, Notes on Some Figures behind T. S. Eliot (1965), 294. " Grover Smith, 250. 8 Frank Morley, 'A Few Recollections of Eliot'; see Tate, 106. IJ An exception to the general critical neglect of the 'Landscapes' is an excellent article by Erik Arne 9 HMC, Letter XI, February 1940. The winter of 1939-40 was extremely severe and there was Hansen, 'T. S. Eliot's "Landscapes''', English Studies, August 1969. 3-+ THE SOURCES OF FOUR QUARTETS THE SOURCES OF FOUR QUARTETS 35 of the 'Five-finger Exercises'. But here, themes and images, rather than to Dr. and Mrs. Carroll Perkins in the house they rented for three summers literary echoes, are treated musically, and the musical reverie arises out of at Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire. Dr. Carroll Perkins, Minister of the memory of a place and a time. Eliot gave his last Harvard lecture on the Unitarian King's Chapel in Boston, was a Doctor of Divinity. His wife 31 March 1933, and at the end of April went to lecture at the University of was the aunt of one of Eliot's old friends from his Harvard days, Emily Virginia. By IS May he was back in Cambridge, 'having just returned from "~""~'··'·"'··Hale.r7 He had first met her through his cousin, Eleanor Hinkley, who was Virginia'. On 12 June, just before he sailed back to England, he was staying still living in the Hinkley family home in Cambridge when Eliot returned at Mountain View House, Randolph, New Hampshire.14 In November 1933 to Harvard. Whether he had known the Perkins as a young man or not, he Frank Morley and Donald Brace took him to Scotland. They were 'met by was made welcome to their home and often dined there. George Blake at Glasgow to drive over Rannoch Moor and to and from' A year after Eliot's return to England the Perkins came over to spend the Inverness'.ls Over eighteen months later, at the end of July I935, the summer. On 18 June I934 Eliot wrote that he rejoiced that Mrs. Perkins Morleys picked him up at Chipping Camp den, where he was staying, to had 'found a satisfactory habitation', adding 'Chipping Campden is only take him on a trip to Wales. The final poem, 'Cape Ann', however, was not a name to me, but 1 know its reputation; the Cotswolds I only know from inspired by a recent visit but by much earlier memories. In the Eliot- the motor route between Oxford and Hereford'. He was soon invited for Hayward Correspondence there is a postcard of a crudely coloured repre- a week-end and on 30 July wrote to express his gratitude. He was at Campden sentation of the statue of Notre Dame de Bon Secours, with a sailing-boat in again early in September and on 4 September wrote 'My weekend, apart place of the infant Saviour carried on her left arm, from Gloucester, from being twice the length, gave me still more happiness than the previous Massachusetts. The card is addressed to Ezra Pound in St. Elizabeth one'. The Perkins did not go home until late in the year, for the Visitors Hospital, and is postmarked 14 June I947. It reads: 'E. P. et famille: Here Book at the Deanery of Chichester records the signatures of Dr. and Mrs. is my Lady that Possum stole. Best dead Madonna this side Atlantic. . . . Perkins, Miss Emily Hale, who gives her address as Scripps College, Yrs. Olson.' A typewritten note by Eliot is attached to the card: California, and T. S. Eliot on 30 November 1934.18 This suggests that Mr. Olson or Olsen is in error. I have never returned to Cape Ann or"·· ..··-'''''''''_···_···MissHalehad been staying with her uncle and aunt throughout the summer to Gloucester Mass. since I9I5. Presumably this statue tops the fa<;ade of 1934· In the following spring the Perkins returned to Campden. Eliot of the R.C. Church in Gloucester. I do not think it was there in my time: wrote on Easter Sunday 1935 to thank Mrs. Perkins for a happy week-end anyway I had no knowledge of its existence when I wrote 'The Dry and his letter makes clear that Miss Hale was there again. He was at Campden Salvages'. But I thought that there ought to be a shrine of the B.V.M. at once more in May, in July, when the Morleys called to pick him up for the the harbour mouth of a fishing port. The church on which this statue trip to Wales, at the beginning of September, and again at the end of the month. On this last visit he wrote a poem 'A Valedictory/Forbidding stands is probably in the town itself. 16 Mourning: to the Lady of the House', dated 28 September I935,19 and on 8 T.S.E. I4· ·47· 30 S eptem b er h e wrote to M rs. P er k'IllS to express h"IS gratltu d e: 'I want now The 'Landscapes' strikingly anticipate the themes of Four Quartets, to thank you for all your kindness and sweetness to me during the past two beginning with the children's voices in 'New Hampshire' and passing summers .... I had come to feel "at home" in Campden in a way in which through the stillness and heat of 'Virginia', and the legendary and historical I had not felt at home for some twenty-one years, anywhere.' The Perkins themes of 'Usk' and 'Rannoch, by Glencoe' to the memories of a New did not come over in 1936, for in a letter, dated 10 July 1936, Eliot wrote to England boyhood in 'Cape Aim'. But, as has been said, when Eliot wrote Mrs. Perkins to give her news and commented on the bad weather in Burnt Norton in the autumn of I935 he had no idea that he was inaugurating England that spring, adding 'The only really lovely day that 1 remember was a sequence of poems which would, unlike the 'Landscapes', combine to a day at the end of May when I motored over from Cambridge to Little make a single unified work. Burnt Norton arose out of what would seem to Gidding'. By April 1937 they had arrived again at Campden and this seems have been the happiest experiences of the Kensington period: his visits to have been their last visit. In addition to her other gifts, Mrs. Perkins was a skilled gardener. Eliot's poem to her is largely concerned with her talents

'4 The dates are from letters addressed to Mrs. Perkins, who was to be Eliot's hostess in the following summers at Chipping Campden. Eliot's letters to her are in the possession of Dr. Donald Gallup, who '7 Emily Hale was a Lecturer in Drama at various American colleges. She died in 1969. kindly allowed me to see them and to take relevant notes. '8 Information from Mrs. E. E. Duncan-Jones, daughter-in-law of the then Dean of Chichester. '5 Frank Morley, 'A Few Recollections of Eliot'; see Tate, 107. '9 There is a fair copy of the poem in the Bodleian Library and a typed draft is preserved with the 16 Eliot's suggestion is correct. letters to Mrs. Perkins. THE SOURCES OF FOUR QUARTETS THE SOURCES OF FOUR QUARTETS 37 as a gardener, mentioning, among other flowers she 'trimmed and trained in Staffordshire; but he tells me that the house was let for a short period in and sprayed' Clematis jackmanii. Anyone who has wrestled with this most the middle 1930S at the time when Eliot visited the garden.22 rampant and lovely of climbing plants can appreciate the precision of The sinister history that iies behind the name Burnt Norton has no bear­ Eliot's verbs in the lines ing on Eliot's poem and the story seems to have faded from local memory. Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis "",.,"",,~ Igive it only because many people are puzzled by the name. In August 1942 Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray I published an article on 'The Recent Poetry ofT. S. Eliot' in New Writing 23 Clutch and cling? and Daylight edited by John Lehmann. The article had been written soon after the appearance of The Dry Salvages, when there was no indication that In.a letter written much later, I I July 1948, Eliot wrote to tell her the good a further poem would follow. As both East Coker and the Dry Salvages were news that the famous gardens at Hidcote Manor, a few miles north of associated with Eliot's personal history, I rashly suggested that he had Camp den, were being taken over by the National Trust and preserved. perhaps some family connexion with Burnt Norton also. Mr. Lehmann 'I was particularly pleased', he adds, 'because I remember so well your sent a copy of the issue of New Writing and Daylight to Eliot, who replied taking me there; and of all the gardens I have visited (mostly with you) that to him with some kind words which Mr. Lehmann passed on to me. After is the one I loved the best.' It was probably by Mrs. Perkins's suggestion the publication of Little Gidding I wrote to Eliot, wishing to let him know that Eliot one afternoon visited the garden at Burnt Norton, although his how much these poems had meant to me, and told him that Mr. Lehmann companion on this occasion was not Mrs. Perkins but her niece, Emily had passed on his remarks. He replied saying my article had given him 'great Hale.20 pleasure' and went on The house and garden of Burnt Norton stand on the edge of the Cotswold escarpment overlooking the Vale of Evesham and a distant view of the Only two very small points occur to me. The first is that I have no such Malvern and Welsh hills. The name is derived from a sensational and connection as you suggest with the house at Burnt Norton. It would not be horrible event in the 1740s. Sir William Keyte, a Warwickshirelandowner worth while mentioning this except that it seemed to me to make a difference of some standing and fortune, having taken as mistress his wife's maid, to thefeeIing tnatit should be merely a deserted house and garden abandoned his wife and younger children and, with his mistress and two wandered into without knowing anything whatsoever about the history elder sons, set up house in the large seventeenth-century farmhouse which of the house or who had lived in it. ... The other point is that I have never is the core of the present house. He proceeded to ruin himself by building read or even heard of the book by Herman MelviIIe.24 American critics a grandiose mansion and laying out gardens, and by indulging in reckless and professors have been so excited about Melville in the last ten years or hospitality and riotous living. After some years of dissipation his fancy so that they naturally take for granted that everybody has read all of his turned to a young dairy-maid. His former mistress left him, as did his sons. books, but I imagine that bell buoys sound very much the same the world After he had for a week drunk himself into a state of frenzy, his new mistress, over. terrified, deserted him also. Left alone, ruined, and desperate with drink, Like Milton's Paradise, the garden of Burnt Norton is a place set apart he set fire to the mansion he had built and was burnt alive. Only some bones, from the rest of the world on a high hill. It is far from easy to find, and is two or three keys, and a gold watch remained of him.2I No trace remains approached by a long private road and over a cattle-grid. Passing behind the today of the mansion Keyte built; the name that commemorates the house, which like the garden overlooks the valley, one comes into a place catastrophe is attached to the' estate and to the original farmhouse which where nothing can be heard but bird-song. Leaning over the balustrade, through the centuries has been expanded into an attractive family house. It came into the possession of the Ryder family, the Earls of Harrowby, 22 Of recent years the house has been let to a schooL It is now being put into order for residence by the present Lord Sandon and the garden will thus revert to the beauty it had when Eliot and his com­ some ten years after the disaster. The present Lord Harrowby lived there panion visited it and which it had retained on my first visits there, My account is based on photographs for many years before moving to the main seat of the family at Sandon Hall taken on my first visit which was in 1952 and ignores the alterations made by the schooL 23 The article was'revised to include Little Gidding and appeared as 'Four Quartets: A Commentary' 20 I suspect, although I have no evidence, that Emily Hale was with Eliot on his short holiday in New in Penguin New Writing (1946) and in T, S. Eliot: A Study o[his Writingshy Several Hands, edited by Hamoshire iust before his return to England in f933- 'New Hampshire' and Burnt Norton are obviously B. Rajan (1947)· '.Xfith some further revision it became Ihe last chapter afmy book The Art ofT. S. EHot very ~losely' linked in feeling as well as in imagery, (1949), 21 The story caused an immense sensation locally and there are many contemporary accounts, The 24 I had suggested, with acknowledgement to Henry Reed, that a passage from Redburn lay behind tale is told by Richard Graves in The Spiritual Quixote (1773), Book x, chapters xxvi-xxviii, with many the close of Part I of The Dry Salvages, Eliot mistakenly assumed Henry Reed was an American Professor improving comments by Wildgoose, of that name. THE SOURCES OF FOUR QUARTETS THE SOURCES OF FOUR QUARTETS 39 one looks down over a steep wooded slope. Near the house, overlooking the significance of 'autumn', Eliot replied simply 'it was autumn', so here he garden, is a huge tree with 'figured leaves' on which, as Eliot did, one can micrhr answer those who look for mystical meanings in the sunflower, e 1 l' r 1 ,rT"1 l' 1 ~. .... ~ -.-/ '.vatch the light at play. Passing through the rose-garden, do\vn some steps, clematis, ana Kmgnsner: 1 nere was a clemans; there was a kmghsher. '.W one comes upon a clipped hedge surrounding a large expanse of grass. In his interview with John Lehmann, Eliot mentioned three sources for Coming out of this, through a gap in the hedge, one finds oneself standing .. Z',;,t...... "."" .."., .... D ...~.f Norton: 'Bits left over from Murder in the Cathedral', the beginning above a grassy bank and looking down on a big rectangular drained pool, of Alice in Wonderland, and the garden.27 The opening paragraph of Burnt 'dry concrete, brown-edged'. Behind it is a smaller semi-circular drained Norton, except for minor alterations in wording, was originally written as pool, with a pediment in the middle where perhaps there once stood a statue a comment by the Second Priest after the exit of the Second Tempter. The and from which a fountain may have played.25 Beyond the grass in which the second of Thomas's temptations is the temptation to attempt to retrace one's pools are set there is a path sloping up through trees to a yew alley running steps, to try to go back to the moment when a choice was made and make the upper length of the garden, chill and cold, where no birds sing. The a different choice: garden, in its stillness and beauty and strange remoteness from the world, The Chancellorship that you resigned stirred in Eliot profound memories and brought together disparate When you were made Archbishop-that was a mistake experiences and literary echoes. On your part-still may be regained. Another actual experience besides the visit to the garden at Burnt Norton came into the poem. In September I933 Eliot paid the first of many visits The temptation is presented to Thomas in political terms. The Priest's to Kelham, the headquarters of the Society of the Sacred Mission, an comment generalizes on 'what might have been and what has been' but then Anglican religious community dedicated to theological education. He gives the comment a profoundly personal application, applying it to the most visited Kelham frequently up to the outbreak of war. Mr. George Every, poignant 'might have been' of our lives: the rose-garden at the end of 'the who was at that time a member of the community, became a close personal which we did not take'. As for Alice in Wonderland, it was already friend and remained in touch with Eliot through the war and after. Mr. E very .... ·,~""*iiii··~--,··~·-·tnecre.m. the bit cut from Murder in the Cathedral, where Alice hears the tells me that on a hot day in the summer of I935 when Eliot was staying at footsteps of the White Rabbit in the passage and cannot get through the Kelham he saw a kingfisher on a stream running into the Trent by Averham door into the rose-garden. In a letter to John Hayward, 5 August I94I, Church over the fields from Kelham and that there is a yew in the church- quoted in the heading to this chapter, Eliot mentioned three other sources: yard there and masses of clematis in the rectory garden next to the his own poem 'New Hampshire'; Kipling's story 'They', which he only churchyard by the same stream. He was not himself with Eliot but two recognized as having contributed to his poem when, five years later, he was students who were told him how excited Eliot was at seeing the bird. Mr. re-reading Kipling for his anthology A Choice of Kipling's Verse; and Every remembers a conversation about Burnt Norton in the year after when a 'quotation from E. B. Browning'. Many years ago I suggested that 'the Eliot spoke of this summer scene. I had always a little wondered at the image of laughing hidden children may have been caught from Rudyard sudden irruption of a kingfisher into Burnt Norton, for the garden is so Kipling's story "They", since the children in that story are both "what remote from any water-unlike the garden of Appleton House surrounded might have been and what has been", appearing to those who have lost their by meadows that flood from the river on which children in the house of a blind woman who has never borne a child'.28

The modest Halcyon comes in sight 26 We should perhaps be a little chary of giving too defined a symbolic meaning to the 'chill fingers Flying betwixt the Day and Night. of yew' in Burnt Norton and the yew tree at the close of The Dry Salvages. There are yew trees in the garden as there is a yew tree in the churchyard where Eliot hoped to be buried at East Coker. A lette!: Mr. Every's reminiscence provides another instance of the presence of from Eliot to Hayward (27 April 1930, EHC), replying to Hayward's appreciation of Ash Wednesday, actual and recent experience in Four Quartets. Just as, when asked for the suggests that even the ews there n a deliberately symbolic meaning: 'Perhaps the yew does not au su ose. It happened to occur III two or tree reams-one was 25 There is a third drained pool in the garden of Burnt Norton, a circular pool among the trees. a iIi'e.C~~~I:.~J!.W-'!.I2Qlll.itL_l}js_clream gave There was some correspondence in The Listener (14 and 28 January 1971), following a BBe. Omnibus E1lOt the beautIful enigmatic line in Animula: programme on Eliot, as to which pool it was that was 'filled with water out of sunlight'. The producer of the programme thought the circular pool in the trees best fitted the description of the garden in the Pray for Floret, by the boar hound slain between the yew trees. poem. But the words 'to look down into the drained pool' exactly fit the surprise of coming through the Of course, the question of what symbolic meaning yew trees had for Eliot at this time to make him gap in the hedge and seeing these empty pools at one's feet. My photographs taken in 1952 show that dream of them remains a legitimate question. the trees around the pools have grown considerably by now. No doubt when Eliot was there in '935 27 New York Times Book Review, 29 November 1953. the pools were less shaded from sunlight even than they were then. " The Art ofT. S. Eliot (1949),160. The suggestion was made to me by Henry Reed. .j.O THE SOURCES OF FOUR QUARTETS THE SOURCES OF FOUR QUARTETS .j.f

I did not, however, identify the song that the blind woman in the story From those overblown faint roses sings as being a quotation from a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. As Not a leaf appeareth shed, Eliot did so, though Kipling does not mention its author, the poem must And that little bud discloses have been known to him29 and I think unconsciously it contributed more Not a thorn's-breadth more of red, than Kipling's story to Burnt Norton. The poem is a long one, called 'The For the winters and the summers which have passed me overhead. Lost Bower', and the blind woman sings the first four lines of the opening stanza, the narrator commenting 'She dropped the marring fifth line': And that music overfloweth, Sudden sweet, the sylvan eaves: In the pleasant orchard-closes, Thrush or nightingale-who knoweth? 'God bless all our gains,' say we, Fay or Faunus-who believes? But 'May God bless all our losses,' But my heart still trembles in me to the trembling of the leaves. Better suits with our degree. Is the bower lost, then? who sayeth The poem goes on to tell how as a child the poet found in a wood a 'bower', That the bower indeed is lost? a kind of garden, and Hark! my spirit in it prayeth Through the sunshine and the frost,- On a sudden, through the glistening And the prayer preserves it greenly, to the last and uttermost. Leaves around, a little stirred, Came a sound, a sense of music which was rather felt than heard. Till another open for me In God's Eden-land unknown, The music is more beautiful than any bird's song; but, as she 'rose up in With an angel at the doorway, exaltation' the music ceased and a silence followed> , White with gazing at His Throne; And a saint's voice in the palm-trees, singing-tAll is lost ... and won!' Heart and head beat through the quiet Full and heavily, though slower: Apart from its first four lines which Eliot said had 'always stuck in my head'30 In the song, I think, and by it, there are no verbal echoes from this mediocre poem; but the music, the bird 's Mystic Presences of power song, the silence, the conjunction of the 'Timeless' and the 'Hour', and the Had up-snatched me to the Timeless, then returned me to the Hour. whole conception that what is lost is not lost but exists to be known in prayer and to be finally restored make Mrs. Browning'S poem a kind of crude and She vowed she would return to the bower but she never found it again. sentimental version of the underlying themes of Burnt Norton. It is an The poem then runs through at some length the many losses she has interesting example of the ways of the poetic imagination that Kipling's suffered in growing up and growing older but declares that, though her over-emotional story and Mrs. Browning's lax effusion should have been 'first was of the bower', she knows it remains just as it was: combined unconsciously to contribute to Eliot's austere and rigorously Springs the ~inden-tree as greenly, philosophic poem on time and time's losses and gains. Stroked with light adown its rind; And the ivy-leaves serenely Each in either intertwined; 11. EAST COKER And the rose-trees at the doorway, they have neither grown nor pined. East Coker was written on the model of Burnt Norton and it bears the marks of its origin. It arises less than the other Quartets out of experiences and memories that came together, and at times seems to follow its model too 29 From 1916 to 1919 Eliot gave a three-year tutorial class at Southall on Modern English Literature. closely, as in the lyrical opening of the second section. East Coker is a Lecture III of the first year was devot~d to Elizabeth Barrett Browning,. and one of the six poems recommended for study, in addition to the 'Sonnets from the Portuguese', was 'The Lost Bower'. See singularly beautiful village in Somerset, not far from Yeovil. Eliot visited Ronald Schuchard, 'T. S. Eliot as an Extension Lecturer, 1916-1919', Review of English Studies, May 1974- . 30 The echo from these is in The Dry Salvages: 'It tosses up our losses.'